Martin Taylor, Deputy CEO, Content Guru
'AI is a key part of our ongoing work, as we continue to develop our hyper-intelligent Machine Agents to deliver a conversational experience to consumers.'
Cloud computing initiatives have experienced an astounding surge over the last couple of years, becoming one of the most significant advancements in the technology realm. Today, the speed and scale enabled by the cloud are unparalleled, revolutionising the way most businesses operate.
Computing's Cloud Excellence Awards recognise the very best of the UK's cloud industry, from the most innovative and compelling products and vendors, through to the top use cases from end-user firms.
This year's winners will be announced at a live awards ceremony on Thursday 21 September in Central London.
Content Guru, one of the finalists, is in the running for the Best Cloud Automation Solution.
We caught up with Martin Taylor, Deputy CEO at Content Guru, to find out what makes their company different from other technology firms.
Martin Taylor is the Deputy CEO of cloud communications technology leader Content Guru. Since co-founding the business, whose storm® cloud platform operates critical communications for some of the world's largest governmental and private sector organisations, Martin has remained at the forefront of innovation in digital and customer experience technology. His direct responsibilities include Content Guru's public sector and healthcare practice, which operates the omni-channel communications that underpin household-name services such as the DVLA, NHS 999 and 111, and Police 999 and 101.
Martin is an elected member of the CBI Tech Council, a member of the Forbes Tech Council and a member of the School of Management at King's College, London, where he lectures on strategy and entrepreneurship.
Computing: Please provide some background on your company for our readers. What makes you different from other companies?
Martin Taylor: Content Guru's cloud-based solution, storm®, ensures that customers' requests and issues get quickly and accurately resolved, enabling organisations to deliver outstanding customer experience at scale. Over 1,000 enterprise-scale public and private organisations in over 50 countries use storm. The solution is trusted by leading global brands, such as AXA, Interflora and Rakuten, for their mission-critical communications.
A full-service cloud provider, Content Guru owns its own infrastructure and can guarantee 99.999%+ availability to customers, with guaranteed data sovereignty and the highest levels of security. storm is the solution of choice for high volume contact centres. Content Guru's full control of its infrastructure means contingency licences can be reserved in advance, meaning organisations can activate new users with unparalleled speed and ease.
What one company achievement in the last 12 months are you most proud of?
I'm most proud of our storm solution being procured by NHS England for its Single Virtual Contact Centre (SVCC). The SVCC programme is centralising provision for 111 services through a single cloud communications solution and enabling 'next available agent' call routing at scale.
Off the back of this we have expanded our provision for 999 calls. Every 999 call for an ambulance in England, Scotland and Wales now passes through the NHS's storm-powered Intelligent Routing Platform (IRP) to find the best available call handler in the shortest time.
What are you working on this year?
AI is a key part of our ongoing work, as we continue to develop our hyper-intelligent Machine Agents to deliver a conversational experience to consumers. Alongside this, we have a dedicated team working on blending ChatGPT into our contact centre solutions, including into our workforce engagement management 'Agent Assist' tool that enables our system to automatically suggest suitable responses to customer queries. We have also been developing automatic form-filling software to take the drudgery out of contact centre work.
What's more, we're pushing to further expand our partner ecosystem, bringing on board more technology partners to ensure storm stays at the cutting edge of innovation. And we're working with selected resellers globally to reach a wider network of organisations, so we can help transform the customer and agent experience for more people and businesses around the world.
Why are events like the Cloud Excellence Awards important to the IT industry?
Events such as Computing's Cloud Excellence Awards are key to recognising genuine talent and ingenuity in the IT industry. We see a lot of positive press for the very largest IT organisations who often appear to have monopolised the space, but a lot of the real innovation still comes from individuals and smaller teams who work tirelessly to develop new and creative technology solutions. These awards are a great opportunity to recognise upcoming talent and out-of-the-box thinking, from wherever it comes in the IT industry.
Cloud Excellence Awards will take place on 21 September in London. Click here to view the shortlist and here to book your table.
